I ate a lot 7/11 onigiri as a poor grad student exploring Tokyo on a long layover once... they're truly wonderful little stores. (They also are one of the few places you can use an ATM, very useful given how cash based Japan is)
He can be proud of the legacy he built, which is something many American founders cannot say with a straight face.
This is a bit out of date. These days basically any ATM allows foreign cards, just in time for Japan to finally switch to electronic payments in a big way (in particular PayPay).
Yes. The payments landscape has shifted pretty dramatically in Japan over just the past 3 years. It used to be that you had to worry about getting cash, IC cards, refilling said IC cards, going to an actual bank with your passport, etc. Now all you need is an iPhone (although I hear Android phones from outside Japan still can't use suica).
I was in Japan recently and did find that my non-Japanese Pixel phone wasn't allowed to use the mobile Suica app, even though the hardware supports it. Some nerds on XDA figured out the mechanism preventing it[0], and if you're rooted it seems like you can run a Magisk module to patch the region check in the PixelNfc component[1].
I guess it's down to licensing for the FeliCa smart card system or something? I will say, as a privacy person, I'm pretty jealous of the ubiquity of IC card payments there. You can buy the card at a kiosk with zero KYC and top it up with cash at the same kiosk. Since it's a stored-value system, it works offline, and you get the convenience of paying with a card with nearly all of the anonymity of paying with cash.
This will remain the case as long as Sony continues to charge Android manufacturers heavy licensing fees for the FeliCa chip needed for Suica/Pasmo.
However, major Japanese cities are increasingly allowing credit card tap to pay for transport, Osaka Metro is already 100% on board and Tokyo has started trials. There's a long tail of minor companies that will likely take forever though.
> These days basically any ATM allows foreign cards
I thought so, too, and perhaps it's just bad luck, but I was at Tokyo Station a few months ago, and I wasn't able to withdraw cash from Mizuho Bank's -- one of the largest retail bank in Japan -- ATM from my US debit card. I ended up walking (getting lost for) ~10 minutes to a Seven Bank ATM, and withdrew cash there without issue. So YMMV.
On our last couple of Japan trips, we would walk into 7/11s for an inexpensive coffee, an egg or fruit sandwich, and also do some treasure-hunting for co-branded items with Muji/Uniqlo or others. It became a short and meaningful part of our routine. We loved the convenient locations and fantastic service at all their stores. Well done, Suzuki-san!
I wonder how 7/11 in the US will change now that the Japanese version bought out the US version. Will we actually have hot and prepared food like Japan? I doubt it, seems the supply chain infrastructure just isn't there.
As others have mentioned, 7/11 in the US has been owned by 7/11 (Japan) for quite a long time, now.
There's some important organizational differences: Stores in Japan are almost entirely franchisee-operated, while stores in the US are more-or-less split 50% on being franchises or corpo.
It's hard to draw conclusions when they're shaped so differently.
But I can say this: Speedway is a large US chain of gas station/convenience stores, with ~2,800 locations (all of them corpo). They varied a lot; some had hot made-to-order food, some others were limited to roller dogs and baked, frozen pizza that was in many ways indistinguishable from cardboard.
There has never been a time when Speedway was awesome, but there have been times when it was acceptable. It was usually better in the suburbs, and worse in the cities (I've seen some weird shit happen at Speedway stores in cities, but they generally kept up with the chaos).
Overall, I'd give 5/10 -- it was often convenient and generally open 24/7, but at all times any of them could have used a lot of very obvious improvement.
5 years ago, 7/11 bought Speedway. They've subsequently managed to allow it to become even worse. Things are dirty, disorganized, clearly lacking any direction other than that which leads towards dilapidation, and the staff just doesn't appear to care about any of it.
Under 7/11's ownership, my buying habits have shifted from "Hey, there's a Speedway. Let's stop in and get a soda or some coffee, or maybe a sandwich" to "Oh look, it's a Speedway. Let's keep moving."
The waste generated is also a major challenge. Having fresh food always ready means trashing a lot of meals. In the US there are networks of food banks and such, but it can still be difficult to keep up with the flow of unpurchased food that is no longer fresh.
It wouldn't make much sense to develop infrastructure around a source of rapidly-expiring food before that source existed. But once the food is there, demand for it will quickly develop.
There's a general theme in policy discussions of people saying "system X has a feature that system Y does not have; therefore, moving from system Y to system X must require a fully-developed auxiliary system to be in place for dealing with that feature before the move can even be considered a possibility". This is complete nonsense; it's what people say when they want to object to something, but don't have any reasons.
> The company's forays into Internet marketing began with a bookselling partnership with Softbank and a book wholesaler in 1999; most books are paid for and picked up at local Seven-Elevens. The next year he engineered a $375 million partnership with NEC, Nomura Research, and Sony, called 7-dream.com, that promised to offer 100,000 products and services over the Internet.
I was living in Japan around 2008 and remember buying concert tickets and picking them up a conbini after purchasing online. I don't remember whether it was a 7 Eleven or Lawsons, but maybe it was a result of this.
The local stores in Japan and Taiwan are really nice. 7/11 and Family Mart are these pleasant places where you can see schoolchildren sitting chatting and eating. That’s not something you’d see in San Francisco.
You’ll see adults with children sometimes at Whole Foods, which is nice, but unattended children not so much.
I learned today that 7/11 in Japan wasn't a pure licensing play but a technology enabled business model disruption of large grocery stores and mom-and-pop convenience stores. The launch of 7/11 Japan introduced: franchising, JIT inventory management, and centralized POS terminals to the Japanese retail market. The linked article explains this in more detail.
Here is decent video on Youtube that goes into the history of the company, and why 7-11s are so different in the US and Japan (tldr: it's the core culture/infrastructure differences):
Wondering if there's a better reference article for this. The current link goes to a page with so many adverts that I saw no actual content on my phone screen.
The fact that people in the current year still don't use ad blockers baffles me. Even on mobile, use Firefox with uBlock Origin and/or DNS66 or AdAway for OS wide blocking, or even just set dns.adguard-dns.com in your phone DNS settings.
It is bizarre, isn't it? My web experience has been broadly cleansed of ads for about as long as we've had a web to experience.
These days, Firefox on Android indeed works great, and so does uBlock Origin. It's a superb combination on the desktop, and also on my pocket supercomputer.
On iOS, I browse with Safari and the free AdGuard extension (from the app store) does quite well.
These mobile browsers even work well for watching videos on Youtube without inserted ads.
They accomplish this cleansing at the cost of at most a few minutes of my time to set them up when a new device comes into the mix. It's a fantastic bargain.
People have choices, and I don't know why anyone would choose to see ads.
I almost never go to a 7/11 in the US but every time I go to Japan I visit a 7/11 at least once a day. No matter where you are in Japan there's likely a 7/11 within walking distance and besides the usual assortment of drinks and snacks you can get quick full meals there of high quality.
Conbini meals only register as "high quality" to you because your comparison point (e.g, American 7-11) is an abysmal excuse for food. The food is, in reality, not that special.
I ate a lot 7/11 onigiri as a poor grad student exploring Tokyo on a long layover once... they're truly wonderful little stores. (They also are one of the few places you can use an ATM, very useful given how cash based Japan is)
He can be proud of the legacy he built, which is something many American founders cannot say with a straight face.
Rest in power sir.
This is a bit out of date. These days basically any ATM allows foreign cards, just in time for Japan to finally switch to electronic payments in a big way (in particular PayPay).
Yes. The payments landscape has shifted pretty dramatically in Japan over just the past 3 years. It used to be that you had to worry about getting cash, IC cards, refilling said IC cards, going to an actual bank with your passport, etc. Now all you need is an iPhone (although I hear Android phones from outside Japan still can't use suica).
I was in Japan recently and did find that my non-Japanese Pixel phone wasn't allowed to use the mobile Suica app, even though the hardware supports it. Some nerds on XDA figured out the mechanism preventing it[0], and if you're rooted it seems like you can run a Magisk module to patch the region check in the PixelNfc component[1].
I guess it's down to licensing for the FeliCa smart card system or something? I will say, as a privacy person, I'm pretty jealous of the ubiquity of IC card payments there. You can buy the card at a kiosk with zero KYC and top it up with cash at the same kiosk. Since it's a stored-value system, it works offline, and you get the convenience of paying with a card with nearly all of the anonymity of paying with cash.
[0] https://xdaforums.com/t/global-pixel-device-unlock-felica-su...
[1] https://github.com/jjyao88/unlock-felica-pixel
This will remain the case as long as Sony continues to charge Android manufacturers heavy licensing fees for the FeliCa chip needed for Suica/Pasmo.
However, major Japanese cities are increasingly allowing credit card tap to pay for transport, Osaka Metro is already 100% on board and Tokyo has started trials. There's a long tail of minor companies that will likely take forever though.
> These days basically any ATM allows foreign cards
I thought so, too, and perhaps it's just bad luck, but I was at Tokyo Station a few months ago, and I wasn't able to withdraw cash from Mizuho Bank's -- one of the largest retail bank in Japan -- ATM from my US debit card. I ended up walking (getting lost for) ~10 minutes to a Seven Bank ATM, and withdrew cash there without issue. So YMMV.
Most let you use them, the post office and 7-11 had the lowest fees
American founders aren’t necessarily more malicious on average.
They just end up rewarded after doing shady tricks more often. Whereas in any other country being too devious too often is fatal.
I guess the archetypal example on HN would be Microsoft or Oracle.
Having spent a significant amount of time in Japan, 7/11 there is an experience the rest of the world needs to know.
On our last couple of Japan trips, we would walk into 7/11s for an inexpensive coffee, an egg or fruit sandwich, and also do some treasure-hunting for co-branded items with Muji/Uniqlo or others. It became a short and meaningful part of our routine. We loved the convenient locations and fantastic service at all their stores. Well done, Suzuki-san!
I wonder how 7/11 in the US will change now that the Japanese version bought out the US version. Will we actually have hot and prepared food like Japan? I doubt it, seems the supply chain infrastructure just isn't there.
Besides the context in the other comments, they pushed the Japanese fresh food angle in a media blitz pretty hard last year (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/business/7-eleven-ceo-ste...). Egg sandwiches seem to be the most reliably available in the contiguous states, but you can also spot egg rolls and onigiri. They're also now bracing to close hundreds of stores and reopen a fraction of that number to match the new model: https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2026/04/17/7-eleven...
It's been fully owned by the Japanese company for over 20 years
As others have mentioned, 7/11 in the US has been owned by 7/11 (Japan) for quite a long time, now.
There's some important organizational differences: Stores in Japan are almost entirely franchisee-operated, while stores in the US are more-or-less split 50% on being franchises or corpo.
It's hard to draw conclusions when they're shaped so differently.
But I can say this: Speedway is a large US chain of gas station/convenience stores, with ~2,800 locations (all of them corpo). They varied a lot; some had hot made-to-order food, some others were limited to roller dogs and baked, frozen pizza that was in many ways indistinguishable from cardboard.
There has never been a time when Speedway was awesome, but there have been times when it was acceptable. It was usually better in the suburbs, and worse in the cities (I've seen some weird shit happen at Speedway stores in cities, but they generally kept up with the chaos).
Overall, I'd give 5/10 -- it was often convenient and generally open 24/7, but at all times any of them could have used a lot of very obvious improvement.
5 years ago, 7/11 bought Speedway. They've subsequently managed to allow it to become even worse. Things are dirty, disorganized, clearly lacking any direction other than that which leads towards dilapidation, and the staff just doesn't appear to care about any of it.
Under 7/11's ownership, my buying habits have shifted from "Hey, there's a Speedway. Let's stop in and get a soda or some coffee, or maybe a sandwich" to "Oh look, it's a Speedway. Let's keep moving."
Their accomplishments here are very impressive.
7/11 Japan has been running the stores in Hawaii for ages, just look there.
Would be great if we could get oniguri in US 7/11s.
I was in 7/11 in the US and they sell egg sandwiches.
coincidence?
The waste generated is also a major challenge. Having fresh food always ready means trashing a lot of meals. In the US there are networks of food banks and such, but it can still be difficult to keep up with the flow of unpurchased food that is no longer fresh.
How is this waste dealt with in Japan? Why can't whatever-that-is be implemented in the US?
It can, but probably not in advance.
It wouldn't make much sense to develop infrastructure around a source of rapidly-expiring food before that source existed. But once the food is there, demand for it will quickly develop.
There's a general theme in policy discussions of people saying "system X has a feature that system Y does not have; therefore, moving from system Y to system X must require a fully-developed auxiliary system to be in place for dealing with that feature before the move can even be considered a possibility". This is complete nonsense; it's what people say when they want to object to something, but don't have any reasons.
> The company's forays into Internet marketing began with a bookselling partnership with Softbank and a book wholesaler in 1999; most books are paid for and picked up at local Seven-Elevens. The next year he engineered a $375 million partnership with NEC, Nomura Research, and Sony, called 7-dream.com, that promised to offer 100,000 products and services over the Internet.
I was living in Japan around 2008 and remember buying concert tickets and picking them up a conbini after purchasing online. I don't remember whether it was a 7 Eleven or Lawsons, but maybe it was a result of this.
The local stores in Japan and Taiwan are really nice. 7/11 and Family Mart are these pleasant places where you can see schoolchildren sitting chatting and eating. That’s not something you’d see in San Francisco.
You’ll see adults with children sometimes at Whole Foods, which is nice, but unattended children not so much.
> but unattended children not so much.
But that's down to larger cultural differences. Japanese schoolchildren probably get less supervision overall than their US counterparts.
I learned today that 7/11 in Japan wasn't a pure licensing play but a technology enabled business model disruption of large grocery stores and mom-and-pop convenience stores. The launch of 7/11 Japan introduced: franchising, JIT inventory management, and centralized POS terminals to the Japanese retail market. The linked article explains this in more detail.
Here's a fascinating video I enjoyed that explains how their business model worked (only) in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3EH4VmxMAo
Japanese 7-11 is a fascinating story.
Here is decent video on Youtube that goes into the history of the company, and why 7-11s are so different in the US and Japan (tldr: it's the core culture/infrastructure differences):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3EH4VmxMAo
Alternate link: https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/25/asia/711-japan-founder-dies-i... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263423)
NYT Obit https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/business/toshifumi-suzuki...
Wondering if there's a better reference article for this. The current link goes to a page with so many adverts that I saw no actual content on my phone screen.
No ads here on desktop or mobile with ublock origin.
The fact that people in the current year still don't use ad blockers baffles me. Even on mobile, use Firefox with uBlock Origin and/or DNS66 or AdAway for OS wide blocking, or even just set dns.adguard-dns.com in your phone DNS settings.
It is bizarre, isn't it? My web experience has been broadly cleansed of ads for about as long as we've had a web to experience.
These days, Firefox on Android indeed works great, and so does uBlock Origin. It's a superb combination on the desktop, and also on my pocket supercomputer.
On iOS, I browse with Safari and the free AdGuard extension (from the app store) does quite well.
These mobile browsers even work well for watching videos on Youtube without inserted ads.
They accomplish this cleansing at the cost of at most a few minutes of my time to set them up when a new device comes into the mix. It's a fantastic bargain.
People have choices, and I don't know why anyone would choose to see ads.
Thanks for letting us know your ad blocker blocks ads. We wouldn’t have figured out by ourselves. /s
I almost never go to a 7/11 in the US but every time I go to Japan I visit a 7/11 at least once a day. No matter where you are in Japan there's likely a 7/11 within walking distance and besides the usual assortment of drinks and snacks you can get quick full meals there of high quality.
https://thisis-japan.com/7-eleven-japan-guide-2025/
Conbini meals only register as "high quality" to you because your comparison point (e.g, American 7-11) is an abysmal excuse for food. The food is, in reality, not that special.